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George Wilson
Targeted assassinations abroad could lead to a police state at home
Retaliation is a chilling but real possibility, writes George Wilson, and it might bring about drastic losses of freedoms we now take for granted. Are we sowing the seeds for our own destruction as a democracy?

Media judgment as a threat to U.S. national security
Juan Cole writes that the nearly nonexistent coverage of the catastrophic Pakistani deluge is another example of how the failure of our electronic media to inform the public about centrally important global developments is itself a security threat to the republic.

Bill Schiller
Reporting a textile workers’ strike in Henan province
Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star: ‘Our arrival sparked a sensation: Police swept in demanding our papers. The crowd swept in on them to make sure we stayed…Then something extraordinary happened: The people applauded us.’

Watchdog Blog
Bob Giles
Overcoming the U.S. Visa Denial of a Colombian Nieman Fellow
This column first appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Nieman Reports. The e-mail message from Hollman Morris was unexpected. It was “urgent,” he said. “Please call im- mediately on Skype.” I reached him and his brother, Juan Pablo, in Bogota. His image on the computer screen revealed a stricken man at pains to say that [...]

Herb Strentz
Des Moines Fair Coverage, Part 2
Cleaning up in the wake of the 2010 Iowa State Fair will be daunting this year. In addition to the mess left by nearly 1 million visitors and thousands of farm animals, we have a continuing saga of news coverage that told of possible racial assaults and then, in Saturday Night Live fashion, appears [...]

Herb Strentz
On ‘Beat Whitey Night’ in Des Moines
(Editor’s note: The incidents described here have become part of a developing story, as this Google link shows.) The Des Moines Register’s reluctance to identify criminal suspects or victims by race has turned into an outright refusal to do so. The closing night of the Iowa State Fair was marked by an observance not exactly on the [...]

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Talking to the media outside channels
The Pentagon increases its efforts to have contacts with the press monitored and approved by DoD public affairs officials.
(Secrecy News)

Telecoms charging more to do nothing
It's getting more expensive to have an unlisted phone number. What's the logic behind that?
(Center for Media and Democracy)

Prosecute those leaks
The Obama administration has indicted another alleged leaker, this time for reportedly passing along to Fox News an intelligence assessment that North Korea was likely to respond to U.N. sanctions by conducting another nuclear test.
(Secrecy News/Federation of American Scientists)

A broad array of massive financial crimes
As PRWatch.org shows, court-imposed settlements have only skimmed the surface of big banks' wrongdoing in the financial crisis.
(Center for Media and Democracy)

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